One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions • Hacker News Board

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#511

Post by gwbas1c » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:32 PM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #496

gwbas1c wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I think you need to have more empathy for why people align themselves with causes you disagree with. If you have the time, I suggest reading "They Thought they Were Free," by Milton Meyer. It's a well-known book that tries to answer why generally "good" people joined or supported the Nazi party in pre-WWII Germany. It's been about a decade since I last read it, but I keep it on my shelf. What I remember, thou…

I've gotten my feet wet in terms of understanding that kind of thing, but not really gotten into it. Thanks for the book recommendation! That said, as legit as your recommendations are, I don't see how this answers my question: How do you differentiate between biased and legitimate disagreement?

> How do you differentiate between biased and legitimate disagreement?

Neutral 3rd party?

But then how do you know the party is neutral?

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#512

Post by mindslight » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #495

mindslight wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link claims to be about tolerance, yet leads with a picture of someone holding a bat menacingly but wearing a uniform that appeals to your political taste. Sorry, no, that is not tolerance. Rather it is political violence . Political violence may be justifiable, but needs to be argued for on its own merits - not couched as an exception to "tolerance". > You can totally go get [a swastika tattoo] . I won't welcom…

Okay, different way to explain it: Person A says "Let's kill all of Group B" Person B says "I won't tolerate Person A" Person C says "I won't tolerate Person B" Person A is being intolerant. They are breaking the terms of the notional peace treaty; the consequence of that is losing the right to be tolerated. Person B is OK because Person A has lost the right to be tolerated. They are not breaking the notional treaty.…

Except very few people are saying "Let's kill all of Group B", especially in 2019, at Google, in San Francisco. But sure, if you want to act on your "intolerance" for that specific flavor of intolerance, then please go to eg Indiana and protest the actual KKK.

Rather what "Person A" is likely to have said is something civil that clashes with the dominant political team's reality distortion field. Rather than having to address the substance, those who disagree feign highly personal reactions as if a minority viewpoint is that "kill all" mortal threat, effectively resorting to the age old monkey status games for silencing dissent.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#513

Post by Frondo » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

leftyted wrote: post #479

Frondo wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the only reasoning I can see that "a union for programmers is a terrible idea" is that you "don't want to read newsletters or listen to speeches or be involved at all in the grubby etc". A unionized workplace doesn't mean you 1) need to join the union (closed shops are illegal in the US) or 2) be involved in the "grubby underhanded maneuvering for power" -- in a pragmatic sense because you can't be com…

> Unfortunately, the only reasoning I can see that "a union for programmers is a terrible idea" is that you "don't want to read newsletters or listen to speeches or be involved at all in the grubby etc". Really? My argument is very straightforward: > The solution is a balance of power between labor and management. In my case, I feel I have plenty of power. In the case of Google employees, I feel they have plenty of p…

"Unionization for programmers is about MORE money, LESS work, and LESS accountability."

Correct, and it is certainly your right to wish for less money and more work, even if that is an unorthodox position to take. Perhaps unfair to advocate on behalf of your coworkers for, in your own words, less money and more work, however.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#514

Post by JohnBooty » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

mrrrgn wrote: post #334

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually follow this? His rant was basically just of a list of stock arguments from the scientific racism era. After he got fired his fans started a fundraiser on a white supremacy website. His arguments were stock white supremacy and the people who adopted him as a hero were stock white supremacists. This isn't hard to figure out.

I'm trying to figure out what you mean by "white supremacy" because you use it so often it seems like something nebulous. -- So it seems that "white supremacy" is a catchall term for anything that argues a biological basis for group differences. Thank you for the links and for not just being aghast that I didn't know this. :]

    So it seems that "white supremacy" is a catchall 
    term for anything that argues a biological basis 
    for group differences.

(I think you're being disingenuous but I'll play along!)

No, not quite.

It's just that their history is inextricably linked.

We can all agree that there is certainly much valid research to be done here. For example, why is sickle-cell anemia so much more prevalent in African-Americans? What biological adaptations allow some populations (Nepalese, etc) to thrive at high altitudes? Nobody finds that sort of thing objectionable.

However, things get ugly fast when we start talking about the study of why one group is best suited for one task or another, or which group is superior in general.

There is a long and sordid history of biological arguments in favor of the superiority of certain groups of people, typically white European males. It should not surprise you to learn that these arguments come from white European males.

Not all studies of "group differences" have anything to do with white supremacy, but every white supremacy movement that has ever existed has claimed a biological basis for their views.

We sort of fought a world war over this (among other reasons) and a lot of people died. These sorts of arguments have also been used to justify slave ownership (a rather large war was fought over this as well) and the oppression of women.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#515

Post by bzbarsky » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:41 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #289

seibelj wrote: post #11

How about everyone goes to work and does their job and goes home. You can believe X, I can believe Y, and both of us believe Z, but XYZ doesn’t have anything to do with doing our jobs so we shouldn’t let it prevent us from doing our jobs. Super cool that everyone likes their own things though, I support liking things unrelated to job, just weird that people demand that their job adheres to whatever weird thing they l…

Generally, yes, I agree. However there are a lot of beliefs that make this kind of approach unworkable. If XYZ wants to believe that the earth is flat, sure, that can just be a personal belief and won't interfere with his work duties... well, unless he is launching satellites for NASA. If XYZ is a furry and thinks anime girls in cat outfits are hot, sure, that's cool too. Also a personal belief that probably won't in…

The interesting thing is that the hypothetical "publishes views about how X are inferior" is considered OK if "X" is "male" or "white", say.

I understand the arguments from a structural racism/sexism standpoint for treating those situations differently from the ones you describe, but the specific test you propose seems to fail just as much: can you trust someone who thinks men are inferior in a job where they might have to interact with men?

(I will note that your use of the male pronoun in describing the untrustworthy employee is itself interesting; not sure whether that's meant to be a gender-neutral "he" or whether you actually believe that only males can hold "undesirable" views.)

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#516

Post by bzbarsky » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

fareesh wrote: post #300

mason55 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can believe X, I can believe Y, and both of us believe Z, but XYZ doesn’t have anything to do with doing our jobs so we shouldn’t let it prevent us from doing our jobs. It's easy to say this if your coworker likes football and you think sports are dumb. But what if your coworker likes attending KKK rallies and you're African-American? Or your co-worker is out there on the weekend holding signs that say "Death t…

> But what if your coworker likes attending KKK rallies and you're African-American? Or your co-worker is out there on the weekend holding signs that say "Death to Gays" and you just happen to be gay? What's the solution for the people in your country who are attending these rallies and holding up these signs? This boycott model of employment will eventually have them fired from minimum wage jobs too. So where would…

It's not that hard for me to reconcile those things, for two reasons:

1) We have plenty of examples from the not-too-distant past of people who were very intelligent and yet definitely racists or bigots by anything resembling modern standards. I'm 99% sure Woodrow Wilson would do fine at a top tech company in terms of carrying out his work duties if he decided to work at one, for example. And he was racist by the standards of his own time, not just ours.

2) The boundaries of what constitutes "outright racism or bigotry" are not fixed, and have been changing quite rapidly in some demographics. My general impression is that 20-something graduates of the top 50 schools in the US have, on average, a very different definition of those boundaries from most 45-year-olds, or from 20-something non-college-graduates.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#517

Post by skissane » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

TwoHeadedBeast wrote: post #418

mcv wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between using the computer and expecting privacy on it. It's entirely possible that you're not supposed to use certain equipment for personal use, but if you do it anyway, that doesn't erode your right to privacy. I'm not saying this is always the case in the EU, though. Obviously there is equipment where for many reasons it's absolutely vital that you don't use it for anything personal. I'm not…

That's interesting. I did work for a company, that had itself registered as a certificate authority on the computer's browser, and for most sites, e.g. Wikipedia, it would use its own certificates and presumably monitor what you were looking at, but for internet banking, it didn't intefere.

> but for internet banking, it didn't intefere

How did this work? I presume they had a whitelist of Internet banking sites. But, do you really think their whitelist would include every Internet banking site in the world? I doubt it.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#518

Post by dang » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #271

matwood wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the talk of inclusiveness today, there is actually very little empathy for groups not of your own (people really should watch This Is Water daily as a reminder). If a person doesn't believe exactly what you believe they must be a . This destroys any real conversation around those topics, and I think ends up pushing normal people toward the fringes.

When people say this, I feel they're often thinking about the decreased tolerance for toxic views. Like that ex-Googler who got fired for repeatedly claiming that women were inferior engineers. There's been a decreased tolerance for... well, intolerance.

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. Those are repetitive, tedious, and off topic. Especially the ones that have run a hundred or more times already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#519

Post by mcrad » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

aedron wrote: post #296

say_it_as_it_is wrote: post #208

What we are seeing are the consequences of "Employee Capture". Google captured the hearts and minds of its employees for workplace productivity. Its side effects are varied. The real world only sees highlights. Googled created a bubble from which its employees can socialize without ever needing to do so with the outside world. Why talk politics with the outside world? Stay with us, where it is safe, people are intell…

With 20 years experience under my belt, it is my firm belief that the workplace is not a place to discuss politics, religion, or other highly personal and divisive issues. Obviously, this extends even more to the workplace itself bringing these topics up. I'm not aggressive or even obvious about this disposition, I just gently steer clear of violating it. I feel the same should apply to companies, fine if you want to…

Sad that this attitude has become the norm. You're basically saying you can do collaborative work with people over the long run without really knowing one another's values. A vicious cycle and "race to the bottom" in terms of both productivity and innovation in my opinion.

Re: One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions

#520

Post by dang » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

indy wrote: post #297

DagAgren wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, none of that is the case. The first thing he did after being fired was run to the far-right propaganda outlets. That was very telling of what he actually believed.

"far-right propaganda outlets"? This is very telling about what you actually believe

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html